I need you to understand something before I kill you.

It didn’t need to come to this. It didn’t. But you ignored my repeated warnings and insisted on intruding where you aren’t wanted. Waiting for me in my bedroom when I go to bed at night. Peeking at me in the shower – yes, I saw you there yesterday, even though you quickly ducked out of sight. But I watch for you now, I watch for you all the time. And I saw.

You’ve made me nervous from our earliest acquaintance, did you know that? Oh I know you claim that you were just going about your business, but I could feel your touch on my skin, a tickling itch that I couldn’t wipe off. For days afterward, I would glimpse you out of the corner of my eye but when I turned you were gone. A fever-dream of panic, or were you just that good at hiding yourself, in the early days, before you got so over-confident?

You could have listened when I told you to go. You could have left at any time – I told you what would happen. But you didn’t. You chose to stay. Now it’s too late; the poison is already working in your system. Soon your internal systems will shut down and I won’t have to worry about you watching me anymore. So knock it off, all the cute little nibbles at the watermelon, the preening of the antennae. It won’t make me feel guilty, at least not guilty enough to save you.

And the bottle says it leaves a residual spray that keeps on killing for four weeks, so don’t even think about sending your friends in. I’ll get them too.